75% Population’s personal data to come under privacy regulations

With concerns on privacy awareness continuing worldwide, the research organisation Gartner predicts, organizations should focus on various privacy trends to help meet the challenges of protecting personal data and meeting regulatory requirements. By the year-end 2024, 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations. This regulatory evolution has been the dominant catalyst for the operationalization of privacy. “Since most organizations do not have a dedicated privacy practice, the responsibility for operationalizing these requirements is passed onto technology, more specifically security, under the umbrella of the CISO’s office. With the expansion of privacy regulation efforts across dozens of jurisdictions in the next two years, many organizations will see the need to start their privacy program efforts now. Gartner predicts that large organizations’ average annual budget for privacy will exceed $2.5 million by 2024.

Think about Data Localization, in a borderless digital society, seeking to control the country where data resides seems counter-intuitive. The risks to a multi-country business strategy drive a new approach to the design and acquisition of cloud across all service models, as security & risk management leaders face an uneven regulatory landscape with different regions requiring different localization strategies. As a result, data localization planning will shift to a top priority in the design and acquisition of cloud services.

Secondly, Privacy-Enhancing Computation Techniques, Data processing in untrusted environments - such as public cloud - and multiparty data sharing and analytics have become foundational to an organization’s success. The pervasiveness of AI models and the necessity to train them is only the latest addition to privacy concerns.

Moving on, there will be centralized privacy, with the Increasing consumer demand for subject rights and raised expectations about transparency will drive the need for a centralized privacy user experience (UX). Forward-thinking organizations understand the advantage of bringing together all aspects of the privacy UX — notices, cookies, consent management and subject rights requests handling — into one self-service portal.

Finally, Remote Becomes “Hybrid Everything” models in work and life settling into hybrid, both the opportunity and desire for increased tracking, monitoring and other personal data processing activities rise, and privacy risk becomes paramount. Organizations should take a human-centric approach to privacy, and monitoring data should be used minimally and with clear purpose, such as improving employee experience by removing unnecessary friction or mitigating burnout risk by flagging well-being risks.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA